I was already crossing the room, past my mother’s empty cage, standing before the white sheet and what was hidden beneath it. “This is the mirror that never lies. The only thing in this house that will tell the truth instead of a tale, even if you don’t like what it is that you see.” I paused, the snake’s head coming to rest in the hollow of my throat. “Stand here with me and look.”
Sevas shook his head, smiling thinly. “I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Afraid that I’ll be ugly,” he said, no longer smiling at all.
My own heart filled up with tender affection. “That’s impossible.”
He sighed, then crossed the room to join me. His shoulders were tensed the way they were when he played Ivan, when he prepared to slay the Dragon-Tsar. They were tensed as if he still wore his feathered mantle. I wondered if that was what he was truly afraid of: seeing Ivan staring back at him.
Exhaling a breath of my own, I took his hand and twined our fingers. Then, with my other hand, I reached for the white sheet that covered the mirror.
I was scared, too, as scared as a little girl who saw horned silhouettes painted against her bedroom wall at night, as scared as a young woman who heard men asking after her while she cowered under her covers. But some transformation had happened inside of me, where no one could see.
I yanked the sheet off with a flourish, letting it puddle to the ground, as bodiless as a dress flung off the clothesline. Sevas’s grip on my hand tightened, and I heard him stammer out my name.
In the mirror, I watched my own shuddering metamorphosis as my reflection warped and cringed and bloomed, all in the span of seconds. I watched black scales pattern my naked belly and cover my bitten breasts. I watched my lips part, redder than red, my forked tongue lashing over rows of blade-sharp teeth. I watched the truth unfold before me, just like the wings that spread from my back.
Chapter Fourteen
I had prepared myself for Sevas to let go of my hand. For him to stumble away, for him to scream. In his mirror, his reflection was unchanged, except that his clothes were gone. Pale bands of scar tissue wrapped around his arms and legs like white ribbons, and there were raised gashes all over his chest, as if every single one of the Dragon-Tsar’s blows had landed. Even his face bore the evidence of old wounds, but he was still so beautiful it made my breath catch to look at him.
I let my fingers go slack, anticipating the moment when he would wrench away from my grasp. But he only held me tighter and faster, like I was a lifeline tossed to him in churning waters. I turned to look into his eyes; in the mirror, my monstrous head turned, too.
“Go,” I told him. “Run.”
“No,” he replied.
“I’ll eat you,” I warned, my voice a whisper.
“You have already tried.” He drew his bitten fingers to my mouth, showing the small cuts I had left. “I welcome you to try again.”
I choked in disbelief. “You would be a fool to stay. The two men on the boardwalk, the one in the theater, the broker who came to our house . . . my very own sister. All of them killed by me and eaten by my father. I slit them open at the belly and tore out their hearts and livers to serve up on Papa’s plate. I could tear out your heart. I could even eat it myself. Do you ache for your own gruesome death so badly?”
“I have died a thousand times already,” Sevas said. “Cruelly, at the hands of the Dragon-Tsar. Gently, in Derkach’s bed. If this is what I am in truth, a man made up of nothing but wounds, why should I fear such a thing now? There is no more perfect mate for me than the one who wears my own mortality around her throat like a jewel.”
As he spoke, he lifted his hand and brushed the hollow of my collarbone, right where the serpent’s head rested, like an amulet of precious onyx.
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “What sort of man cares so little for the blood of innocents spilled? What sort of man weds a woman with such terribly sharp teeth?”
“I do,” Sevas said. His blue eyes were so bright, pooling with moonlight. “I could spend the rest of my days proving it to you. I have the patience and fortitude of seven thousand Ivans.”
His reflection in the mirror reached up to touch the end of my wing, and I felt a phantom shiver go through me, some disembodied sensation that was so faint I thought I must have imagined it.
Was I a woman inside the body of a monster, or was I a monster inside the body of a woman? I had wondered the same thing of my bird-mother, when she had first been transformed. Did she still have a woman’s heart and a woman’s mind within all those delicate bones and beneath all those white feathers? Papa’s potions had cut out a black space in my mind where the memories of my murders ought to have been, but that was not enough to absolve me. Those men and that broker and my sister were all still dead by my hand, even if it had been guided by Papa’s magic.